His Dark Materials Omnibus (43 page)

“Human prisoners?” Iorek said.

“Yes—Iofur Raknison put them in the dungeons—they ought to come out first and get shelter somewhere, else they’ll be killed with all the falling rocks—”

Iorek gave swift orders, and some bears hurried into the palace to release the prisoners. Lyra turned to Iorek.

“Let me help you—I want to make sure you en’t too badly hurt, Iorek dear—oh, I wish there was some bandages or something! That’s an awful cut on your belly—”

A bear laid a mouthful of some stiff green stuff, thickly frosted, on the ground at Iorek’s feet.

“Bloodmoss,” said Iorek. “Press it in the wounds for me, Lyra. Fold the flesh over it and then hold some snow there till it freezes.”

He wouldn’t let any bears attend to him, despite their eagerness. Besides,
Lyra’s hands were deft, and she was desperate to help; so the small human bent over the great bear-king, packing in the bloodmoss and freezing the raw flesh till it stopped bleeding. When she had finished, her mittens were sodden with Iorek’s blood, but his wounds were stanched.

And by that time the prisoners—a dozen or so men, shivering and blinking and huddling together—had come out. There was no point in talking to the professor, Lyra decided, because the poor man was mad; and she would have liked to know who the other men were, but there were many other urgent things to do. And she didn’t want to distract Iorek, who was giving rapid orders and sending bears scurrying this way and that, but she was anxious about Roger, and about Lee Scoresby and the witches, and she was hungry and tired.… She thought the best thing she could do just then was to keep out of the way.

So she curled up in a quiet corner of the combat ground with Pantalaimon as a wolverine to keep her warm, and piled snow over herself as a bear would do, and went to sleep.

Something nudged her foot, and a strange bear voice said, “Lyra Silvertongue, the king wants you.”

She woke up nearly dead with cold, and couldn’t open her eyes, for they had frozen shut; but Pantalaimon licked them to melt the ice on her eyelashes, and soon she was able to see the young bear speaking to her in the moonlight.

She tried to stand, but fell over twice.

The bear said, “Ride on me,” and crouched to offer his broad back, and half-clinging, half-falling, she managed to stay on while he took her to a steep hollow, where many bears were assembled.

And among them was a small figure who ran toward her, and whose dæmon leaped up to greet Pantalaimon.

“Roger!” she said.

“Iorek Byrnison made me stay out there in the snow while he came to fetch you away—we fell out the balloon, Lyra! After you fell out, we got carried miles and miles, and then Mr. Scoresby let some more gas out and we crashed into a mountain, and we fell down such a slope like you never seen! And I don’t know where Mr. Scoresby is now, nor the witches. There was just me and Iorek Byrnison. He come straight back this way to look for you. And they told me about his fight.…”

Lyra looked around. Under the direction of an older bear, the human prisoners
were building a shelter out of driftwood and scraps of canvas. They seemed pleased to have some work to do. One of them was striking a flint to light a fire.

“There is food,” said the young bear who had woken Lyra.

A fresh seal lay on the snow. The bear sliced it open with a claw and showed Lyra where to find the kidneys. She ate one raw: it was warm and soft and delicious beyond imagining.

“Eat the blubber too,” said the bear, and tore off a piece for her. It tasted of cream flavored with hazelnuts. Roger hesitated, but followed her example. They ate greedily, and within a very few minutes Lyra was fully awake and beginning to be warm.

Wiping her mouth, she looked around, but Iorek was not in sight.

“Iorek Byrnison is speaking with his counselors,” said the young bear. “He wants to see you when you have eaten. Follow me.”

He led them over a rise in the snow to a spot where bears were beginning to build a wall of ice blocks. Iorek sat at the center of a group of older bears, and he rose to greet her.

“Lyra Silvertongue,” he said. “Come and hear what I am being told.”

He didn’t explain her presence to the other bears, or perhaps they had learned about her already; but they made room for her and treated her with immense courtesy, as if she were a queen. She felt proud beyond measure to sit beside her friend Iorek Byrnison under the Aurora as it flickered gracefully in the polar sky, and join the conversation of the bears.

It turned out that Iofur Raknison’s dominance over them had been like a spell. Some of them put it down to the influence of Mrs. Coulter, who had visited him before Iorek’s exile, though Iorek had not known about it, and given Iofur various presents.

“She gave him a drug,” said one bear, “which he fed secretly to Hjalmur Hjalmurson, and made him forget himself.”

Hjalmur Hjalmurson, Lyra gathered, was the bear whom Iorek had killed, and whose death had brought about his exile. So Mrs. Coulter was behind that! And there was more.

“There are human laws that prevent certain things that she was planning to do, but human laws don’t apply on Svalbard. She wanted to set up another station here like Bolvangar, only worse, and Iofur was going to allow her to do it, against all the custom of the bears; because humans have visited, or been imprisoned, but never lived and worked here. Little by little she was going to increase her power over Iofur Raknison, and his over us, until we
were her creatures running back and forth at her bidding, and our only duty to guard the abomination she was going to create.…”

That was an old bear speaking. His name was Søren Eisarson, and he was a counselor, one who had suffered under Iofur Raknison.

“What is she doing now, Lyra?” said Iorek Byrnison. “Once she hears of Iofur’s death, what will her plans be?”

Lyra took out the alethiometer. There was not much light to see it by, and Iorek commanded that a torch be brought.

“What happened to Mr. Scoresby?” Lyra said while they were waiting. “And the witches?”

“The witches were attacked by another witch clan. I don’t know if the others were allied to the child cutters, but they were patrolling our skies in vast numbers, and they attacked in the storm. I didn’t see what happened to Serafina Pekkala. As for Lee Scoresby, the balloon soared up again after I fell out with the boy, taking him with it. But your symbol reader will tell you what their fate is.”

A bear pulled up a sledge on which a cauldron of charcoal was smoldering, and thrust a resinous branch into the heart of it. The branch caught at once, and in its glare Lyra turned the hands of the alethiometer and asked about Lee Scoresby.

It turned out that he was still aloft, borne by the winds toward Nova Zembla, and that he had been unharmed by the cliff-ghasts and had fought off the other witch clan.

Lyra told Iorek, and he nodded, satisfied.

“If he is in the air, he will be safe,” he said. “What of Mrs. Coulter?”

The answer was complicated, with the needle swinging from symbol to symbol in a sequence that made Lyra puzzle for a long time. The bears were curious, but restrained by their respect for Iorek Byrnison, and his for Lyra, and she put them out of her mind and sank again into the alethiometric trance.

The play of symbols, once she had discovered the pattern of it, was dismaying.

“It says she’s … She’s heard about us flying this way, and she’s got a transport zeppelin that’s armed with machine guns—I think that’s it—and they’re a flying to Svalbard right now. She don’t know yet about Iofur Raknison being beaten, of course, but she will soon because … Oh yes, because some witches will tell her, and they’ll learn it from the cliff-ghasts. So I reckon there are spies in the air all around, Iorek. She was coming to … to pretend to help Iofur
Raknison, but really she was going to take over power from him, with a regiment of Tartars that’s a coming by sea, and they’ll be here in a couple of days.

“And as soon as she can, she’s going to where Lord Asriel is kept prisoner, and she’s intending to have him killed. Because … It’s coming clear now: something I never understood before, Iorek! It’s why she wants to kill Lord Asriel: it’s because she knows what he’s going to do, and she fears it, and she wants to do it herself and gain control before he does.… It must be the city in the sky, it must be! She’s trying to get to it first! And now it’s telling me something else.…”

She bent over the instrument, concentrating furiously as the needle darted this way and that. It moved almost too fast to follow; Roger, looking over her shoulder, couldn’t even see it stop, and was conscious only of a swift flickering dialogue between Lyra’s fingers turning the hands and the needle answering, as bewilderingly unlike language as the Aurora was.

“Yes,” she said finally, putting the instrument down in her lap and blinking and sighing as she woke out of her profound concentration. “Yes, I see what it says. She’s after me again. She wants something I’ve got, because Lord Asriel wants it too. They need it for this … for this experiment, whatever it is …”

She stopped there, to take a deep breath. Something was troubling her, and she didn’t know what it was. She was sure that this
something
that was so important was the alethiometer itself, because after all, Mrs. Coulter
had
wanted it, and what else could it be? And yet it wasn’t, because the alethiometer had a different way of referring to itself, and this wasn’t it.

“I suppose it’s the alethiometer,” she said unhappily. “It’s what I thought all along. I’ve got to take it to Lord Asriel before she gets it. If
she
gets it, we’ll all die.”

As she said that, she felt so tired, so bone-deep weary and sad, that to die would have been a relief. But the example of Iorek kept her from admitting it. She put the alethiometer away and sat up straight.

“How far away is she?” said Iorek.

“Just a few hours. I suppose I ought to take the alethiometer to Lord Asriel as soon as I can.”

“I will go with you,” said Iorek.

She didn’t argue. While Iorek gave commands and organized an armed squad to accompany them on the final part of their journey north, Lyra sat still, conserving her energy. She felt that something had gone out of her during that last reading. She closed her eyes and slept, and presently they woke her and set off.

Lyra rode a strong young bear, and Roger rode another, while Iorek paced tirelessly ahead and a squad armed with a fire hurler followed guarding the rear.

The way was long and hard. The interior of Svalbard was mountainous, with jumbled peaks and sharp ridges deeply cut by ravines and steep-sided valleys, and the cold was intense. Lyra thought back to the smooth-running sledges of the gyptians on the way to Bolvangar; how swift and comfortable that progress now seemed to have been! The air here was more penetratingly chill than any she had experienced before; or it might have been that the bear she was riding wasn’t as lightfooted as Iorek; or it might have been that she was tired to her very soul. At all events, it was desperately hard going.

She knew little of where they were bound, or how far it was. All she knew was what the older bear Søren Eisarson had told her while they were preparing the fire hurler. He had been involved in negotiating with Lord Asriel about the terms of his imprisonment, and he remembered it well.

At first, he’d said, the Svalbard bears regarded Lord Asriel as being no different from any of the other politicians, kings, or troublemakers who had been exiled to their bleak island. The prisoners were important, or they would have been killed outright by their own people; they might be valuable to the bears one day, if their political fortunes changed and they returned to rule in their own countries; so it might pay the bears not to treat them with cruelty or disrespect.

So Lord Asriel had found conditions on Svalbard no better and no worse than hundreds of other exiles had done. But certain things had made his jailers more wary of him than of other prisoners they’d had. There was the air of mystery and spiritual peril surrounding anything that had to do with Dust; there was the clear panic on the part of those who’d brought him there; and there were Mrs. Coulter’s private communications with Iofur Raknison.

Besides, the bears had never met anything quite like Lord Asriel’s own
haughty and imperious nature. He dominated even Iofur Raknison, arguing forcefully and eloquently, and persuaded the bear-king to let him choose his own dwelling place.

The first one he was allotted was too low down, he said. He needed a high spot, above the smoke and stir of the fire mines and the smithies. He gave the bears a design of the accommodation he wanted, and told them where it should be; and he bribed them with gold, and he flattered and bullied Iofur Raknison, and with a bemused willingness the bears set to work. Before long a house had arisen on a headland facing north: a wide and solid place with fireplaces that burned great blocks of coal mined and hauled by bears, and with large windows of real glass. There he dwelt, a prisoner acting like a king.